Month: November 2011

I was recently contacted by Byon (the developer of the TinyTrak) asking me if I was a user of APRSdroid. As I have an Android phone (HTC Desire A8183) I certainly do use APRSdroid! so I was asked to test out a serial bluetooth device for use with the TinyTrak4.

Here’s an image is of the TT4BT (the name as appears via Bluetooth) The unit draws power from the TinyTrak4 including voltage pass through so you can supply power for your GPS. For my testing I’m using the Byonics GPS2, the Bluetooth adapter is using the HC-05 module, I’m not going to cover the specifics of this module, but to say that Byon has set it for a serial speed of 19200 baud (factory default is 9600 baud) You won’t be needing to make any adjustments to this module!

The setup within APRSdroid is fairly straight forward, The only thing I altered was the channel number used from no entry (auto detect) to channel 1 although because of only having the one device this wasn’t essential. Included below is a rough pictorial guide on how to set up APRSdroid with Bluetooth.

The settings required for your TinyTrak4 (using firmware 0.67) is to simply set AMODE to KISS and ABAUD to 19200 baud. As you will be using APRSdroid to generate your position you’re not required to have a GPS connected to your TinyTrak4 (as APRSdroid is using your phones internal one!)

You can contact the author of APRSdroid via GitHub or on the IRC channel #aprsdroid on the FreeNode network.

Further details on the TinyTrak4 you can contact Byon on the following link

I’ve purposely kept this brief as there are other resources that cover the specifics of these two devices from their respective developers, I didn’t see the need to recreate their content! 😉

Like this:

I was recently contacted by Byon (the developer of the TinyTrak) asking me if I was a user of APRSdroid. As I have an Android phone (HTC Desire A8183) I certainly do use APRSdroid! so I was asked to test out a serial bluetooth device for use with the TinyTrak4.

Here’s an image is of the TT4BT (the name as appears via Bluetooth) The unit draws power from the TinyTrak4 including voltage pass through so you can supply power for your GPS. For my testing I’m using the Byonics GPS2, the Bluetooth adapter is using the HC-05 module, I’m not going to cover the specifics of this module, but to say that Byon has set it for a serial speed of 19200 baud (factory default is 9600 baud) You won’t be needing to make any adjustments to this module!

The setup within APRSdroid is fairly straight forward, The only thing I altered was the channel number used from no entry (auto detect) to channel 1 although because of only having the one device this wasn’t essential. Included below is a rough pictorial guide on how to set up APRSdroid with Bluetooth.

The settings required for your TinyTrak4 (using firmware 0.67) is to simply set AMODE to KISS and ABAUD to 19200 baud. As you will be using APRSdroid to generate your position you’re not required to have a GPS connected to your TinyTrak4 (as APRSdroid is using your phones internal one!)

You can contact the author of APRSdroid via GitHub or on the IRC channel #aprsdroid on the FreeNode network.

Further details on the TinyTrak4 you can contact Byon on the following link

I’ve purposely kept this brief as there are other resources that cover the specifics of these two devices from their respective developers, I didn’t see the need to recreate their content! 😉

Like this:

Some months back the developer of YARPP announced that his work was going into syndication with BlogGlue. At this point users were urged to consider switching to BlogGlue. So I did just that and signed up for a free account. At first all seemed to be good, However it has become apparent that there is some serious trouble with BlogGlue’s support/maintenance as there was frequent times of Twitter & Facebook being flooded with your past blog posts.

This has happened to me on 3 occasions now, and it’s has to stop! so I figured it was time to disable the WordPress plugin and the service permissions to my Twitter & Facebook accounts thinking that would have been the end of it. Well no it wasn’t as for the last few days old blog posts have been appearing within my Twitter & Facebook accounts!

This posting is to serve two purposes, one being to see if there’s any further interaction with BlogGlue and the second is to vent my frustration over BlogGlue. I noticed that there’s no option to delete your account from them either 😐

So the above is what has been scraping my site for the last 3 weeks continuously! So I’ve resorted to banning the IP range & made several entries in my robots.txt file (although I don’t believe that this bot is acting in any compliance to such)

Although I’m not overly concerned for its presence, however the spam comment hit rate has skyrocketed since this has been interrogating me. China with it’s known history of human rights abuse appears to be scraping the internet, but what is being done with all this information? (not that I’d say there’s anything of any importance on this site!)

I admit that blocking such traffic goes against the grain of how I feel about internet freedom,but when a spider is crawling your site without disclosing a reason (and as I said my spam hit has increased) then I’m not going to allow such traffic as it has the potential to effect other services.

Like this:

I recall many years ago as a child the time that makes up one year seemed to be an age! Now with a few years under ones belt it’s amazing how that time now seems to pass much quicker than you recall. It has just occurred to me that your perception of time alters, and as many have no doubt had similar memories/experiences…

So what is the point of mentioning this? None, if only to acknowledge that my observation isn’t as effective as I thought!